by Dave Eggers
It could be a purely sentimental...
I wonder. But I also remember thinking of taking pictures. At the time, I was painting a lot from photographs, and thought that they’d come in handy later, photographs, that I would take a bunch, from different angles, and use them as source material later.
But you didn’t.
No. To be honest, I didn’t really even strongly consider doing so,
but the point is that I thought of it.
And then you went to Florida.
After the service, we spent twenty minutes or so at a tea and cookies sort of thing in the rectory, and then said goodbye. My then-girlfriend Kirsten was there, and Bill, and my uncle Dan, and after a while we sort of said, See you all later, love you, and then took off, completely wired with adrenaline, driving until midnight, stopping in Atlanta. The next day we drove until there was sand along the highway, and we were in Florida, and we bought new bathing suits, and got sand in the car—the car that our dad would under no circumstances ever let us drive or allow food into—and watched HBO at night in the hotel room, and Toph and I played frisbee during the day, on a white, white beach, and the wind was warm and wet, and we called Bill at night, and thought about visiting a few relatives we had down there—Tom and Dot, I mentioned them before—but then didn’t, because they were old, and for the time being we were done with such people.
And then you—
I never gave them a proper burial.
Excuse me? What does that— I don’t know where they are.
What do you mean?
They were cremated. They decided, I guess together, God knows why, and from where the idea came, that they would donate their bodies to science. We had no idea why—it didn’t really gel with any long-held beliefs that we knew them to have; we had never heard them talk about it. My dad was an atheist, we knew that— my mother claimed he worshiped “The Great Tree”—so in his case it makes some sense, the body donation plan, but my mother was very Catholic, far more romantic, emotional, superstitious even maybe, when it came to such things. But all of a sudden the orders were there—I can’t remember if we knew before or after; it must have been after his death and before hers, come to think of it—and that’s what happened. After they were taken to the coroner’s or wherever, at some point they were picked up by a donor service, and brought to this or that medical school, where they were used for God knows what.
This disturbs you?
Well, of course. At the time, we thought it was kind of noble. It surprised us, the donating, so with everything sort of spinning out of control, we just rolled with it, I suppose in part because it made arrangements easier.
What do you mean?
Well, the casket and all. Or lack thereof.
You didn’t have a casket?
No. Nothing. We had services for each, of course, but we didn’t
bother with the casket, considering it would be empty and all.
So there was no standard funeral ceremony, like at a cemetery,.. No.
They have no gravestones.
They have no gravestones. We have no idea where they are, as a matter of fact. I mean, the people from the body donation company promised that after they were done, they would cremate the bodies and then send them to us, but they haven’t. At least not yet. It was supposed to be within about three months. But now it’s going on about two years.
So you don’t have the remains?
Right. Actually, it’s kind of funny—they don’t call them remains; they call them “cremains.” But we still think the ashes might be coming. Beth thinks they haven’t been returned because we’ve moved a few times. She thinks they probably tried to contact us and couldn’t find us because we moved to the Berkeley sublet and then again, and so threw them out, or whatever. I kind of think they might still be there, somewhere.
Have you tried to contact the donation service?
No. I think Beth has. It’s something that we talk about every couple of months, actually, but less and less frequently. It’s hard, because the later it gets, the farther from that time we find ourselves, the more impossible it becomes to even broach the subject. It’s kind of embarrassing, really. For me at least. That and the lack of the gravestones, the lack of funerals, the selling or disposing of most of the contents of the house. It was all such a blur, and we were moving so far, and there was so much to be done. I was trying to finish college, commuting back and forth, three days in Chicago and four in Champaign, all spring, and Beth had to do everything else—trying to sell the house, get the estate sale figured out, finding a school in Berkeley for Toph, paying all the bills, selling Mom’s car...We were convinced that we would be forgiven anything, really, any lapses in judgment, any mistakes, all the horrible mistakes. Some of the stuff we sold...
You regret all that.
Sometimes. Sometimes Beth and I agree that it’s best, the way we cleared out, the clean break we made from home, from most elements of the.. .you know, it was weird, but a few people frowned upon our taking Toph away and moving to California, thinking that the best support network would be there, in Lake Forest, blah blah. But good lord we could not get far enough away, were sure that we’d all end up this sad local legend, these sorry celebrities, and Toph this ward of the town.. .no way. And so we didn’t do a cemetery funeral or anything, didn’t bother with coffins. Beth always says how our parents did not want a funeral, that the whole funeral and gravestone thing was just a racket, was this ridiculous tradition, rooted in commerce, a Hallmark holiday sort of thing, and besides, it was much too expensive. So we can ease our conscience with that, and by assuming that we carried out their wishes.
Do you think they really wanted it that way?
No, not for a second. Beth does. Beth is sure, Beth was there. But I.. .1 honestly think they can’t believe we haven’t buried them yet, that we don’t even know where they are. It’s appalling, really.
Maybe.
But I really think that embalming dead people, dressing them up, putting makeup on them...it’s brutal, medieval. There is a large part of me that really likes the idea of them having sort of disappeared, just gone—with us never really seeing them once they passed on, that they just floated away or something, that because they were not buried, that might be—
Do you dream of them?
My sister dreams of them constantly. All the time, and in her dreams our parents are often cheerful, talking and walking and saying interesting things. I have not seen my parents talking and walking and saying interesting things since they died. When we talk about it, when we are not fighting about responsibility and all, my sister and I sit on the couch and she tilts her head and twirls her hair around her finger and pieces together her most vivid dreams. In most of them, our mother is doing something simple like driving or cooking, and when she dreams of my father, my father is skulking around or has just killed someone or is chasing her. But every so often a dream with him in it is a nice dream. And thus I’m jealous, because I’d love to see them walking and talking again, even if it was fabricated in a dream. But I don’t dream of them. I have no idea why not, and how to remedy that problem.
Why not just think about your parents just before bed? That would seem to be at least one way of doing it.
I’ve tried that. I mean, I have tried to try. For instance, right now, I’m thinking Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that tonight, thanks for reminding me. But somewhere along the line I will forget. It’s happened a hundred times. Why can’t I remember to think of my parents before I sleep? Why can’t I simply leave a note on the pillow— THINK OF PARENTS? Why can I not do this? I mean, the rewards would be so great—for instance, if I were to think of my mother just before I fell asleep, there is a fairly good chance that my dream would bring her to life—the making of dreams as we all know is often that crudely predictable—and yet I can’t bring myself to do it, to remember, to do the basic work necessary. It’s flabbergasting. Actually, I have dreamed of my father once, sort of. In the dream, I am driving on
Old Elm, a street near our house, and it’s winter, no snow, just gray. I’m driving down the hill, from 7-Eleven to home, and I suddenly see, maybe two hundred yards away, along a parallel road, through a million bare twiggy trees, a car, exactly like my dad’s. It’s a gray Nissan something something, and in it is a gray-haired man wearing an old brown suede coat, looking almost exactly like my father, except that even in the dream I’m sort of doubtful that it’s him—in the dream, I know he’s gone, and that what I’m seeing must be a coincidence or mirage, but then suddenly it occurs to me—this is where, in the dream even, it both conforms to logic and departs wildly from it-it occurs to me that he could very well be alive still, that his death made so little sense in the first place, was so sudden and illogically timed, that...and then the other factors conspire together—that none of us were there when he finally died, that we have not received his remains—cremains, sorry—and in the dream it occurs to me that it could simply be another deception, that maybe he’s alive after all...
What do you mean, another deception?
Well, like all people who drink, and do so while successfully keeping a family and a job, he was an extraordinary magician. The tricks, once found out, of course, were kind of flimsy, but at the time, for so long, they fooled a houseful of naturally sneaky and suspicious people. The most famous trick was the AA trick, which involved attending AA meetings, in our house even, while a few fingers under. It was great. He had gone for about a month to a treatment center somewhere, while we were out East visiting relatives, and when we got home, he was there, sober, dry, triumphant. We were all elated. We felt like we were finally done with all that, our family was suddenly this clean and new thing, and naturally, because he was sober and strong and everything, he’d conquer the world and bring us with him. We sat on his lap, we worshiped him. Maybe that’s a bit strong. I guess in a lot of ways we still hated and feared him, after all the years of yelling and chasing and everything, but still, we were resilient, and wanted things to be normal—we were not really sure what normal was, or if we had ever been a part of it, come to think of it—but we were hopeful nonetheless. And then the meetings, including the one held in our living room. We were supposed to stay in bed, but one time I snuck down and peeked through the stairway’s railing and saw all these adults, foggy through all the smoke, and our dad there, in the spot on the couch where he sat on Christmas. It was weird seeing all those adults in the house—our parents did not entertain—but the point is that he was drinking even then, probably even that night—we never knew, they didn’t know—which is a neat trick, if you think about it. It’s a trick I have to respect, being diabolical myself and all.
How could he be drinking undetected if he was home all the time? Aha. Yes. There wasn’t a bottle in the house. We searched the place. My mom was vigilant, we were too. But you know where it was? It’ll make you choke, it’s so simple. Every so often, early in the mornings—it was the only time he was really alone, and would not rouse suspicion—he would go out, get a bottle of vodka and four or five liters of quinine, and would bring them home.
Then he’d...
Yeah, he’d empty out half the quinine containers, fill them with vodka, and then toss all evidence of the vodka. So at night, when we all gathered in the family room, watching Three’s Company or whatnot, he’d go into the kitchen and—oh, this was a great detail—he’d pour the quinine (vodka) into, instead of the short glasses he used to use, a short glass that would indicate, to the casual observer, alcohol, he used a tall glass. A tall glass and we were fooled! To recap: What goes in the short glass? Alcohol. What goes in the tall glass? A soft drink, of course! Yes, the tall glass is the container of choice for a nice, cool, nonalcoholic beverage. Can you imagine? He must have felt like the cleverest guy in the world, or at least more clever than his dim-witted brood. This went on for about a year—all while we were flush with pride and hope, believing that he had quit and that there would be no more moving, for days and weeks at a time, to friends’ and relatives’ houses, no more talk of leaving him, all that, and as we were all rebuilding, all the while—it was incredible. Of course, what’s more, with the tall glass (remember: tall glass * soft drink), he was drinking even more, and we became increasingly confused, because while he was ostensibly sober, he was still talking funny after ten, still raging suddenly and implacably, and still falling asleep sitting upright on the couch, at eleven every night.
So after he was discovered, he quit?
Oh God, no. My mother went out on the patio, closed the sliding door and screamed and cried, her arms wrapped around her shoulders, and there were probably a few threats of leaving, all that. But then we kind of gave in. My mother was exhausted, by him and us, the three of us had recently become four, and I suppose she conceded that he was going to drink, that he was born to drink— and was quite good at it, by the way, a pretty functional drinker, not a gone-on-a-bender sort, harmless if not provoked. So with a new baby, moving or leaving suddenly became far more difficult to do (or even to threaten to do) and I imagine at some point our exhausted mother just came to terms with him—this many drinks a night and no more, blah blah. And when you think about the lengths he went to deceive us, in the interest, of course, of keeping us from leaving—he would arrange his schedule in really any way at all, would do the flimsy, sad little lies, with the quinine and tall glasses, for instance—all so we wouldn’t leave—when you think about that, well, he was not perfect, but he was a decent man. And so he reduced his nightly intake after that, readily accepted the truce, drank only beer or wine at home, and as Toph started crawling and then walking, he plateaued. And to tell you the truth, we almost preferred it that way. The whole A A vibe was unsettling, and all those adults in the house, the murmuring and the smoke, it didn’t seem appropriate for him, he just wasn’t a group sort of guy, buying into all that. In a way, we just didn’t want our father to be in AA. He wanted to control or kick it on his own, and that’s really the way we preferred it, too. And AA was probably murder for him, with all the references to higher powers and whatnot, the whole gist of which held no water for him. Anyway, after the whole treatment ghost was given up, it was better then because it was all out in the open, we knew the exact parameters of him and he of us, and we could then prepare for eventualities. Which I had been horrible at doing, never knowing what to expect. See, from when I was very small, I had this wild, horror-infested imagination—it was, for example, my firm belief for a few years that when we went to bed the downstairs turned into a laboratory for human experimentation, a cross between snippets I’d seen of Coma and Willy Wonka, filled with Oompa-Loompa men and bodies in stasis—and that, with even a little of his unevenness, could combine and make chaos and terror where it wasn’t necessarily there— I mean, for me, it ended, that thin brittle rope of trust between a parent and child snapped, probably when I was about eight, with the door thing.
Which was...
This was when things were a little messy, when he was a little less in control. And I don’t remember what the issue was, but I had apparently done something wrong, and so was supposed to stand for punishment—you know what was funny? We were, when due punishment, in each instance told to “assume the position,” meaning to come over and lean over his knees—so quaint, can you believe it?—and of course I wasn’t going to have any part of that garbage. Not that he ever really hit us all that hard—our mom was the one who really put her weight into it—but there was something terrifying about his fumbling, his clumsy grabbing...it was just so unpredictable, because we knew enough to know when he was already blurry, so we just didn’t want to be anywhere near his area of—you know that game, octopus? Where you run around, trying to get from one side to the other, past all your classmates and then the red line, where they can’t touch you, but you can’t get near any of the limbs, with their little perfect arms suddenly so perilous, so horrifying?—it was like that in a way, a heightened sense of terror born of doubt, a lack of predictability in his behavior—we ju
st did not want to get close enough to him at night for something weird to happen. So with the verdict handed down and the spanking imminent, we ran. Every time we ran, and tried to get far enough away and for long enough that—and this was usually more wishful thinking than practical—that his anger would subside, or our mother would intervene, or both: a reprieve granted. If the episode took place during the day we’d just run down the street, to the park or the creek or a friend’s, and wait it out. But at night—which is when these things usually happened, given we only saw our father, an avid golfer, a few daylight hours each week—of course we (or at least I) couldn’t go outside, being sure that it was much worse out there, the neighborhood being populated with the vampires from Salem’s Lot and the William Shatner mask man from Halloween. At night, options were limited to those within the house, which were many, actually, though each with its particular merits and drawbacks. Down in the basement you could hide in the furnace area or the crawl space, but for the area to be effective one had to keep the lights off, and one never knew when there would be actual murderers there, in the furnace area or crawl space, or corpses—highly possible, of course. Then there were the closets, which were often effective, but in a closet, though one felt warm and safe, one was found so suddenly—the sliding door would woosh open and the hands abruptly there, grabbing—and so the best places were either the upstairs bathroom or one’s own bedroom, both of which had simple locks and often held for long enough for things to settle down on the other side. So on this particular night, I ran to my room, closed and locked the door and, while listening to his bellowing from the bottom of the stairs— this is, by the way, what he did first, inexplicably demanding that we come down, come down the stairs to allow him to take us with his hands and drag us back to the couch where he would shake us around, get us into position, and then do the whacking... ludicrous. We did not owe him that, I did not owe him that, of course not, we never deserved spanking because we were perfect, perfect, perfect, unassailable, or if not perfect at least provoked into whatever it was we did, and so, while in my room, while staring at the door, hyperventilating, I looked around for ideas. I looked to the wallpaper—it was the kind that’s actually a huge photograph, mine being an orangey fall forest scene; my mom and I had picked it out, thought it was so beautiful, had sat on the floor staring at it after we put it up—and in my room that night I wanted to run through it, through the orange forest, because it looked like it went deep, the forest, and it was daylight there besides. But of course I didn’t think of really doing that, I wasn’t stupid or delusional but then looked to another wall, to the unpapered wall over my bed on which I had drawn, with markers, twenty or so little monsters and happy but still presumably fierce Viking men, all created to protect me as I slept, and to come to life in such situations as this—but they were not coming to life, and why were they not coming to life? The yelling continued and, sure that he was still downstairs, I snuck out of my room and into the hall, grabbed the phone, and jumped back into my room, sliding the cord underneath and again locking the door. I brought the phone to my bed and called the operator and asked for the area code for Boston. Then I remembered it wasn’t Boston, it was Milton, outside Boston. I called for information in Milton, looking for my aunt Ruth. Or Uncle Ron. She had done AA, he had been with her, they knew what was what—what should I do? I would ask, they would know, they would intervene...Then the footsteps started coming up the stairs, which they only did some of the time, the times when he was extraordinarily angry and our mother could not calm him down, and as they thumped up the stairs—why did he go so slow, so maddeningly slow?—I hung up the phone—I didn’t have time now—and devised a plan. I opened the window over my pillow, then tore the sheet off my bed. The footsteps stopped thumping, meaning he was on the second floor, was just six or seven steps from my door... I twisted the sheet so it looked like a rope or however I had seen it look on TV and as I began to tie it around the bed frame there was the trying of the door, then suddenly my name so loud I jumped, then pounding and demands yelled, and if I could just get this thing tied in time... the thumping got louder and louder and then the sheet was tied, twice-over, I yanked it to test its strength and it seemed okay—it only had to hold for a few seconds, just until I was far down enough to jump— and so I turned my body on my bed and started to scoot back, reaching a leg out the window, feeling my bare foot against the coarse wood of the side of the house...and then the pounding stopped. I was still lowering myself, almost half out the window now, the night was humid, I was able to see the ground, the neighbor’s yard, holding the sheet in two hands...I paused, breathing